A flood of information

What constitutes information? What are its properties? And how have our lives adjusted to its omnipresence? Ambitious though he is in The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, James Gleick does not pretend to answer these questions fully. Rather, he aims to show the possibilities these questions pose for the human race, which evolves from both obvious and obscure forms of information, from...

Audio Column by Sukey Howard

James Gleick, one of our finest science writers, has the ability to make a complicated subject totally understandable and thoroughly intriguing. In Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (5 hours), he tackles the endless ramifications of our time-obsessed culture as it, and we, gather speed, shaving nanoseconds from our multi-tasking lives, already awash in a glut of information...

The faster I go, the behinder I get, runs the rustic saw, which would have made a good epigraph to James Gleick's Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything. For that matter, so would the famous cry from Walt Kelly's comic strip, Pogo, We have met the enemy, and he is us, because in just about everything we modern Westerners do concerning time, we are our own worst enemy. This utterly...